As Passes Miss the Mark, Peyton Manning’s Future Begins to Waver

DENVER — Somewhere in the anxiety-ridden depths of the fourth quarter, Peyton Manning stood tall as a ship mast in the Broncos pocket and tossed once, twice, three times into the middle reaches of the field.

His team’s condition was precarious: The Broncos trailed the Indianapolis Colts in the A.F.C. divisional playoff game. Each of his passes was reasonably well tossed, although without much starch. And each time the Colts defenders, those acrobats of the secondary, went airborne and slapped or punched or knocked the ball down.

Then the oddest of sounds was heard in this most often joyous orange-tinged stadium. Low, sonorous boos washed down from the stands, accompanying Manning on his walk back to the sidelines. The fans saw, and perhaps Manning did as well, another postseason slip-sliding away.

How, Manning was asked after the game, did he play? He looked at the reporter and shook his head, with disapproval of no one but himself.

“Not well, not good enough, didn’t play well enough,” he said.

Taps rarely sound for a great athlete in a single, climactic moment. Rather, the player experiences an accumulation of small indignities, the erosions of age adding a second or two to a pass, a split second off a handoff, muting that sixth sense that allows him to pick up a 300-pound man sprinting at him, shoulders aimed at his midsection.

Michael Jordan could score 20 points a game pretty much right to the end, but the ferocious athletic fires that made him magnificent had already banked. Willie Mays still could deliver a handsome home run, but the mind’s eye more clearly recalls that aging star stumbling about, lost in the windy center field shadows at Shea Stadium.

There’s no morality play to be found here. The notion, put forward by a Boston columnist Sunday, that Manning is a “habitual loser” of big games is sportswriter shorthand for deadline silliness. Manning has gone to three Super Bowls, playing against the best in the world, and he’s won once. There is no vein of shame to be mined here.

Peyton Manning is one of the greatest ever to play the game. For many years his soaring passes seemed attracted as if by homing beacons to the hands of his receivers.

Sunday offered Round 2 this season for the Colts and the Broncos, and Manning and Andrew Luck, the silver-armed young quarterback who may one day have his own Super Bowl victory. The teams met in a season opener in the same stadium, and the atmosphere then was festive. A blonde lass rode around on her white horse and fires sounded and fans screamed and drank their brews and munched on their gummy bears.

Manning won that duel, his arm true. Although in what may now be seen as foreshadowing struggles to come, he grew weaker as the game progressed. For the season, the pattern repeated. Manning was among the most dominant quarterbacks in the game for the first half of the season, then faded noticeably in the last six games.

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When asked after the game how he played Sunday, Peyton Manning looked at the reporter and shook his head. “Not well, not good enough,” he said. “I didn’t play well enough.”CreditEzra Shaw/Getty Images

Sunday’s game began in high spirits, with the spitting fire and the smoke and the gladiator’s triumphant entry. Manning marched the Broncos downfield for an early touchdown and fans thumped their feet, and it was as if a dozen D trains ran beneath the press box.

Then, slowly, ineluctably, he and his team began to fade. Manning tossed long, soaring balls three, four, five times.

Each began as a beauty, you could hear the fans suck in their breath, and each landed two, three, four feet beyond the grasping hands of his receiver. “We did probably go to the well too many times,” Broncos Coach John Fox said of those long passes.

Perhaps that is so. Or perhaps Peyton Manning, with three neck operations and 17 years in the league, has begun to lose that piano tuner’s expert feel for precisely the right note.

By halftime, the Colts had dominated the ball, and Luck outplayed Manning. If stomach-twisting anxiety was a thing alive, it was wriggling inside every stomach at Sports Authority Field. With two minutes left in the fourth quarter and the Broncos trailing by more than a touchdown, the fans began to head to the exits.

Fox looked drawn afterward. He spoke of the Darwinian calculus of the playoffs. “At some point, it’s a train wreck for everybody but one,” he said.

A few minutes later, Manning stepped to the lectern. Already in a natty tweed jacket and tie, he stared straight ahead as the questions came. To his credit, he did not retreat into the comfort of the blandly formulaic answer. Those long passes that had gone awry? “Those were my decisions,” he said. “I ended up taking some long shots.”

Nor did he try to sidestep the bigger questions. “Didn’t play well enough consistently in the second half of the season,” he offered.

Is this, he was asked, simply a question of age?

He shook his head, not in disagreement so much as shared uncertainty about the answer. “I’ve always taken a pretty accurate look and fair evaluation of myself,” he said. “My mind-set is disappointment.”

He paused. A reporter rephrased the question. Are you considering retirement?

“Ah, yeah, I guess I can’t just give that simple answer,” he said. “I’m processing it.”

The painful business of game autopsy complete, he stepped off the stage, his eyes downcast, his future a blank slate.

Email: powellm@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Quarterback’s Future Begins to Waver as Passes Miss the Mark. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe